TERRAFORMING TERRA
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A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

How to Occupy a Bank With Ellen Brown

Without question, the too big to
fail system has to be down loaded into the State and Municipal environment as
much as possible and as soon as possible if only because too big to fail has
visibly failed the whole US economy.

I also suspect that the general
package needs to be also downloaded into an ‘agro village template’ which needs
to be designed properly and shaken down before it is fully implemented.This is a revolution in the human condition
whose time has surely come.It would end
once and for all the idea of aristocratic privilege whose last refugia happens
to be in the game of debt finance and at the head of super corporations that
have literally lost touch with reality and succumbed to the finance game.

Richly distributed capital
empowers from the ground up and generally assures a qualitative improvement.

However, stepping into the state
and Muni level of government is feasible now.

Ellen makes it clear and the case
is actually compelling even without the present ongoing crippled system.

How to occupy a bank

By Ellen Brown

Dec 16, 2011

Occupy Wall Street has been both
criticized and applauded for not endorsing any official platform. But there are
unofficial platforms, including one titled the "99% Declaration",
which calls for a "National General Assembly" to convene on July 4,
2012, in Philadelphia.
[1]

The 99% Declaration seeks
everything from reining in the corporate state to ending the Federal Reserve to
eliminating censorship of the Internet. But none of these demands seems to go
to the heart of what prompted Occupiers to camp out on Wall Street in the first
place - a corrupt banking system that serves the 1% at the expense of the
99%. To redress that, we need a banking system that serves the 99%.

Occupy San Francisco has now endorsed a plan aimed
at doing just that. In a December 1 Wall Street Journal article titled

"Occupy Shocker: A
Realistic, Actionable Idea", David Weidner writes:

[P]rotesters in the Bay Area, especially Occupy San Francisco, have something their East
Coast neighbors don't: a realistic plan aimed at the heart of banks. The
idea could be expanded nationwide to send a message to a compromised Washington and the financial
industry.

It's called a municipal bank.
Simply put, it would transfer the City of San Francisco's bank accounts - about
$2 billion now spread between such banks as Bank of America Corp, UnionBanCal
Corp and Wells Fargo & Co - into a public bank. That bank would use small
local banks to lend to the community. [2]

{this is essentially what I have
been saying.The ability to create fiat
money through loans must be decentralized and placed deep into the
economy.Large cities and Satates are a
natural place to start.}

The public bank concept is not
new. It has been proposed before in San Francisco
and has a successful 90-year track record in North Dakota. Weidner notes that the
state-owned Bank of North Dakota earned
taxpayers more than $61 million last year and reported a profit of $57 million
in 2008, when Bank of America
had a $1.2 billion net loss. The San Francisco bank proposal is sponsored by
city supervisor John Avalos, who has been thinking about a municipal bank for
several years.

Weidner calls the proposal
"the boldest institutional stroke yet against banks targeted by the Occupy
movement."

Responding to the critics

He acknowledges that it will be
an uphill climb. In a follow-up article on December 6, Weidner wrote:

Of course, there are critics. ... They argue that public banks would
put public money at risk. Would you be surprised to know that most of the
critics are bankers?

That's why you don't hear them
talking about the $100 billion they lost for the California pension funds in 2008. They don't
talk about the foreclosures that have wrought havoc on communities and tax
revenues. They don't talk about liar loans and what kind of impact that's had
on the economy, employment and the real estate market - not to mention local
and state budgets. [3]

Risk to the taxpayers remains
the chief objection of banker opponents. "There is no need for such
lending," they say. "We already provide loans to any creditworthy
applicant who comes to us. Why put taxpayer money at risk, lending for every
crackpot scheme that some politician wants to waste taxpayer money on?"

Tom Hagan, who pays taxes in
Maine, has a response to that argument. In a December 3 letter to the editor in
the Press Herald (Portland),
he maintained there is no need to invest public bank money in risky retail
ventures. The money could be saved for infrastructure projects, at least while
the public banking model is being proven. The salubrious result could be to cut
local infrastructure costs in half. Making his case in conjunction with a Maine turnpike project,
he wrote:

Why does Maine
pay double for turnpike improvements? Improvements are funded by bonds issued
by the Maine
Turnpike Authority, which collects the principal amounts, then pays the bonds
back with interest.

Over time, interest payments
add up to about the original principal, doubling the cost of turnpike
improvements and the tolls that must be collected to pay for them. The interest
money is shipped out of state to Wall Street banks.

Why not keep the interest
money here in Maine,
to the benefit of all Mainers? This could be done by creating a state-owned
bank. State funds now deposited in low- or no-interest checking accounts would
instead be deposited in the state bank.

Those funds would be used to buy
up the authority bonds and municipal bonds issued by the Maine Bond Bank. All
of them. Since all interest payments would flow into the state treasury, we
would end up paying half what we now pay for our roads, bridges and schools.

North Dakota has profited from a state-owned
bank for 90 years. Why not Maine?
[4]

The state bank could generate "bank credit" on its books, as
all chartered banks are authorized to do. This credit could then be used to buy
the bonds. The government's deposits would not be "spent" but would
remain in the government's account, as safe as they are in Bank of America -
arguably more so, since the solvency of the public bank would be guaranteed by
the local government.

Critics worry about the
profligate risk-taking of politicians, but the trusty civil servants at the
Bank of North Dakota
insist that they are not politicians; they are bankers. Unlike the Wall Street
banks that had to be bailed out by the taxpayers, the Bank of North Dakota invests conservatively. It
avoided the derivatives and toxic mortgage-backed securities that precipitated
the credit crisis, and it helped the state avoid the crisis by partnering with
local banks, helping them with capital and liquidity requirements. As a result,
the state has had no bank failures in at least a decade.

With intelligent use of the
ever-evolving Internet, truly effective public oversight can minimize any
cronyism. California's
pension funds might have avoided losing $100 billion if, instead of gambling in
the Wall Street casino, they had invested in infrastructure through the state's
own state bank.

The constitutional challenge

In Weidner's Wall Street Journal
article, he raises another argument of opponents - that California law forbids using taxpayer money
to make private loans. That, he said, would have to be changed.

The US Supreme Court, however, has held
otherwise. In 1920, the constitutional objection was raised in conjunction with
the Bank of North Dakota and was rejected both
by the Supreme Court of North Dakota and the US Supreme
Court. See Green v. Frazier, 253 US 233 (1920), [5]. (For further discussion on
this, see note 6 below.)

A municipal bank would be doing
with the public's funds only what Bank of America does now: it would be
lending "bank credit" backed by the bank's capital and deposits. The
difference would be that the local community, not Florida
or Europe, would get the loans; and the city of San
Francisco, not Bank of America, would get the profits.

California and many other states already own
infrastructure banks that use the states' funds to back loans. If that use of
public monies is legal, and if public funds can be deposited in Bank of America
and used as the basis for loans to multi-national corporations, they can be
deposited in the Bank of San Francisco and used as the basis for loans to the
local community.

Better yet, they can be used to
buy municipal bonds. Investing in municipal bonds would avoid the
constitutional issue with "private loans" altogether, since the loans
would be to local government.

Sending a message to Wall Street

The campaign to "move your
money" has gotten a groundswell of support, but move your money into what?
Weidner repeats the complaint of critics that private credit unions have gotten
too big and threaten commercial banking. Having greater impact would be to
"move our money" - move our local government revenues out of Wall
Street banks into our own publicly owned banks, which could then generate
credit for the local economy and public works.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking
Institute, PublicBankingInstitute.org. In Web of Debt, her latest of 11 books,
she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the
people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are
WebofDebt.com and EllenBrown.com.

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Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.